Beethoven’s music directly impacts human lives. It evokes emotion and inspires creativity. Its value lies in its immediate effect. In contrast, knowing that life exists millions of light-years away offers no such tangible impact. It’s a data point. An interesting one, sure, but it doesn’t feed the hungry, cure disease, change policy, or even affect your commute. So yea, Beethoven is a lived experience, whereas aliens in Andromeda are an abstract concept.
It depends what you mean by "civilization building". I think we gloss over that a bit too much. We're not the largest population, not the largest total mass, not the only one that builds large structures. We're the only one that sent stuff outside of Earth, yes, and a few other things. But discussing the definition is itself interesting
Human civilisation means intelligence and memory are collective, externalised, persistent, communicable. There's also a layer of symbolic abstraction (science and math) which makes it possible to predict useful consequences with some precision.
Individuals die but their inventions and insights remain. Individuals can also specialise, which is a kind of civilisational divide and conquer strategy.
Most animals don't have that. Some do train their young to a limited extent, but without writing the knowledge doesn't persist. And without abstraction it only evolves extremely slowly, if at all.
They have to reinvent the wheel over and over, which means they never invent the wheel at all.
We actually have this problem with politics and relationships. We keep making the same mistakes because the humanities provide some limited memory, but there's no symbolic abstraction and prediction - just story telling, which is far less effective.
Bonus points: I often wonder if there's a level of complexity beyond our kind of intelligence, and what it might look like. Abstraction of abstraction would be meta-learning - symbolic systems that manipulate the creation and distribution of civilisational learning.
AI seems to be heading in that direction.
There may be further levels, but we can't imagine them. We could be embedded in them and we wouldn't see them for what they are.
The only similar example I can think of is when, roughly 2400 million years ago (during the Paleoproterozoic iirc), the ancestors of cyanobacteria poisoned their atmosphere by overproducing oxygen which resulted in an extinction event. But that whole process still took somewhere in the order of millions of years to complete I believe.
> But that whole process still took somewhere in the order of millions of years to complete I believe.
The geological evidence is that that oxygen build-up first had to exhaust things that took the reactive oxygen out of the air and water. Iron oxide was laid down as huge deposits of "banded iron ore" The great rust. (1)
This is hard to get an exact number on, but as far as I know, it is estimated to have taken at least 500 million years.
And then oxygen increased again, a billion years later (2)
It was not fast. It was measured in 100 million year ticks.
Not the poster, but I don't understand the downvotes: this is exactly right. Higgs was awarded the Nobel after the mechanism he theorized was experimentally confirmed, and that is 100% the reason it took so long.
Right! Einstein didn't get the Nobel because the theory of relativity is awesome, he got it after Eddington observed gravitational lensing during an eclipse, confirming a key prediction.
Brilliant theorizing can be both brilliant and wrong.
OPTION 1. Donate to the Sustainable Island State Contribution (SISC)
Your SISC donation to the Government of Saint Kitts and Nevis must be at least $250,000 as a single applicant. Additionally, this rises to $275,000 if you include an extra dependent under 18. Furthermore, if you add a dependent over 18, you will pay $300,000.
OPTION 2. Invest in Property
The Developer’s Real Estate Option requires you to invest no less than $400,000 in an approved real estate development. Consequently, you must own the property for at least seven years. Furthermore, it can only be resold once, to a new CBI programme member.
In contrast, an Approved Private Home, either a condo or single-family dwelling, qualifies as a CBI option. In this case, you must pay at least $400,000 to the condo owner and $800,000 to the single-family dwelling owner.
Subsequently, you have to own the private home for at least seven years. Following this, you can’t resell your real estate investment to a CBI applicant unless Federal Cabinet approves. Ultimately, you must inject substantial extra investment by way of construction, renovation, or any other improvements.
OPTION 3. Contribute to an Approved Public Benefit Project
Invest at least $250,000 in a project that boosts local employment and, also, transfers all real estate to the State on completion.
A downhill where a road bike can reach that speed is pretty normal. I reach those nearly every day on my to work commute and I live in Iowa - there is a reason we are known for being flat so if I can find a hill to reach those speed surely anyone else can too. Of course I am riding a road bike, kids and mountain bikes may have limitations (tires?) that slow them down.
Reaching those speeds on level ground doesn't seem possible for a normal human, but level ground is rare.
I can hit 45 mph going down hill on my 1980 road bike... but that's just balance, carrying enough potential energy, being too stupid to slow down to a reasonable speed, and having hills that I have to walk the bike up most of the time. There's some skill and physical conditioning there, but not a whole lot; at that speed, there's a lot of instant feedback on form, which helps encourage one to get low and tight.
I think if we're talking about how fast you can get your bike to go, flat land, still air is implied. I don't have a lot of those conditions to try, but I'm happy to cruise around 15, and maybe push it to 20 if I don't need to save my energy for a nearby hill.
I'm not sure what you might mean by a "normal human".
I used to be a back-of-the-front-of-the-pack triathlete, with a previous history as an ultramarathon and touring cyclist. In my best shape (probably aged around 46), I was training on a flat loop course with some younger very strong but not professional cyclists where we would generally pull the group at 28mph for about between 20-60 seconds at a time.
I appreciate that there's a distance between that sort of thing and an "average person", but it's not a whole lot larger than the distance between the people who were in the group and, say, professional tour cyclists.
This makes a point against the "CEO morning routine" kind of approach, but from my point of view, it is not that different from that perspective on life. It still talks about "proactively moving towards #1 or top 25%", "be so good they can't ignore you", "10x work", "something extraordinary" etc.
Take that direction if that's what makes you tick. I've decided that that's not how I want to live my life, quit a 'prestigious' position, left the competitive career, and I now work as a teacher with "10x personal satisfaction".
Only semi-related to satisfaction, but I was looking at a chart of suicide rates by industry recently[0]. And the lowest rate for both men and women was "Education services" and "Education, training, and library," aka teachers.
My guesses as to why:
- To teach is to be focused on the future, day after day. This is the opposite of dwelling on the past, which is commonly associated with depression, which is commonly associated with suicide.
- Teachers are surrounded by kids, and kids tend to change and develop drastically over the course of a year, usually for the better in terms of knowledge and maturity. Seeing that might inspire some optimism.
- Teachers are a crucial pillar of an impressionable community of hundreds of children at that. So they're less likely to trend toward suicide, because they feel less alone, more community, more accountability, and more responsibility.
- There's something inherently purposeful about teaching, at a deep biological level. Purposeful work leads to a purposeful life leads to lower chances of suicide.
Or maybe it's easy to just drop out of teaching? Versus a more specialized profession, like dentistry?
Also, you'll notice that the highest suicide professions are also the most physically dangerous. It stands to reason that suicide often follows a life-changing debilitating injury. That would be pretty rare in teaching.
The complexity of a field you are leaving doesnt make it hard to drop out. A dentist is very well prepared to be a hair stylist, but I've never heard of that choice.
Dentists also don't have a lot of job related debilitating injuries, aside from depressions.
But also - you can end up with class of unruly spoiled kids and experience burnout after burnout. You see almost any higher profession have much more money in their lives, despite having a massive amount of free time. But that free time ain't so huge as it may seem - good teachers keep preparing themselves even in their 50s for next day, grading, school bureaucracy etc.
I have a climbing buddy who is US origin and teaches smaller kids in Geneva, Switzerland in prestigious private school, all above applies hard for him. Got off this school year twice from burnout. Normally he has 1-2 bad kids but this year it was 10, every day was pure suffering for him and even with assistant it was above their capabilities. The thing is, its a profession that makes you unemployable elsewhere apart from basic blue collar jobs, so quitting is not really that good of an option.
Just giving perspective, I am not teacher and probably wouldn't enjoy doing it. Preferring work hard and then have some cool time in the mountains during evenings/weekend or travel for holidays. But I consider it massively underpaid profession, those folks deserve same recognition as doctors are getting (with logic that doctors 'just' treat current problems, but teachers literally hold future of mankind in their hands and mold it, and in this world you cca always get what you pay for).
it's certainly possible to be depressed due to dwelling on the future. i guess it'd be anxiety or if you're just in a terrible situation with no easy way out
Is that because of pay and CoL? I imagine if you work hard in your 40s and have a lot of financial success, transitioning to teaching might be less stressful.
If you already have a house and a fat 401k, just paying the bills at a certain age is fine.
The actual teaching is like 10% of the job at best and shrinking, school administrators have to be the dumbest category of people who hold advanced degrees (I don’t level that charge lightly), schools are heavily hierarchical and hard to influence toward improvement if you’re not in admin, constant methodology churn for all sorts of things based on whichever new “system” caught the superintendent’s fancy at their last district-funded drinking getaway er, I mean, conference. Which they’ll go on to half-understand, fail to apply the parts that make them uncomfortable, and of course doom the new program without its even having a chance. While creating a bunch of new work for the teachers and breaking stuff that was working fine. “Office” politics where the median would qualify as quite bad in the private sector.
Politicians and half the parents think you’re the enemy, in a very real way. No support from parents on discipline issues. Admin piss-pants scared of parents, too. Comp-vs-CoL varies wildly over the country, and mostly in the ways you’d expect, so it’s ok some places but it’s terrible in many others.
Yeah exactly. I don’t even think he’s right about how pivotal a lot of them bellwether events he cites are. If you don’t nail the punchline in your marketing you can change the punchline or the marketing. So it’s important but because it can be changed you might find yourself taking another path than “home run marketing” that is still very successful. For all he’s decrying hustle culture he seems very immured in it.
At some point I had a post-it that said "happily unsatisfied" next to my desk. My bf had told me to think of making the changes I needed, with a timespan of five years, not "asap". That helped a lot.
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